The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

by Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel

  Two old beggar women press their faces against the colorful stone wall of the church.

  I overhear their whispering.

  “They are waiting for them to come out. This isn’t no service. The Patriarch and all his men have gathered in the church. They re having a discussion.”

  The swollen feet of the beggar women are wound in red rags. White tears dampen their inflamed lids.

  I go and stand next to the official. He is chewing without lifting his eyes, spittle bubbling in the corners of his purplish lips.

  The bells chime heavily. The people huddle by the wall and are silent.

  AT THE STATION: A SKETCH FROM LIFE

  This happened about two years ago at a godforsaken railway sta-J tion not far from Penza. In the corner of the station a group had gathered. I joined them. It turned out that they were sending a soldier off to war. Someone, drunk, was playing a concertina, raising his face to the sky. A hiccuping youth, a factory hand by the look of him, his thin body quaking, reached out his hand to the man with the concertina and whispered, “Come, make our souls weep, Vanya!”

  Then the youth walked away and, turning his back to the crowd, slyly and carefully poured some eau de cologne into a glass of Khanzha liquor.

  A bottle of lusterless liquid was passed from hand to hand. Everyone drank from it. The soldiers father was sitting pale and silent on the ground nearby. The soldiers brother was vomiting incessantly. He keeled over, his face lolling into the vomit, and passed out.

  The train pulled in. They began saying their good-byes. The soldier s father kept trying to stand up—he couldn’t open his eyes, let alone get on his feet.

  “Get up, Semyonich,” the factory hand said. “Give your son your blessing!”

  The old man didn’t answer. The others started shaking him. A button on his fur hat hung loose. A constable came up to them.

  “How disgusting!” he muttered. “The man is dead and they’re shaking him.”

  It turned out to be true. The old man had passed out and died. The soldier looked around in dismay. His concertina trembled in his hands and emitted some sounds.

  “Just look at you!” the soldier said. “Just look at you!”

  “The concertina is for Petka,” he added, holding out the concertina. The stationmaster came out onto the platform.

  “Damn loafers!” he muttered. “Some place theyVe picked to gather! Prokhor, you son of a bitch, ring the second bell!”

  The constable hit the bell twice with the large iron key to the station toilet. (The bell s tongue had been ripped out long ago.)

  “You should be bidding your father farewell,” they told the soldier, “and you re just standing around like an idiot!”

  The soldier bent down, kissed his father s dead hand, crossed himself, and dully walked over to the railway car. His brother was still lying in his own vomit.

  They took the old man away. The crowd began to disperse.

  “That’s sobriety for you,” an old merchant standing next to me said. “They die like flies, those sons of bitches!”

  “Well, brother, dont talk to me about sobriety!” a bearded muzhik said roughly. “Our people is a people that drinks. Our eyes need to be all fuzzy.”

  “What did you say?” the merchant asked him.

  “Take a look,” the muzhik said, pointing at the field. “Its black and endless.”

  “So?”

  “Well, nothing, really. You see the murk?The peoples eyes have to be like that too—murky.”

  ON PALACE SQUARE

  A long-armed Italian, old, shabby, shivering with cold, ran across the stage and, placing his finger to his lips, whistled up at the sky. Two airplanes, their engines rattling, twirled above him. The pilots waved scarves at Signor Antonios little bald patch. The crowd shouted, “Hurrah!” Signor Antonio jumped up and down on the planks covered with a red carpet, waving at the twinkling little stars. And, surrounded by howling boys, he yelped, “You want the Barinka, huh? The Marseillaise, huh?” And, wriggling, he began whistling the Marseillaise.

  This took place on Palace Square by the Victory Statue in front of the Winter Palace. Draped in orange, yellow, and crimson sheets, magicians came somersaulting across the stage. Shivering torches thrown by a jugglers practiced hand flashed through the air.

  Fireworks soared over the Neva. The black water blazed with purple light, cannon thunder rumbled beside us, howling and frightening like enemy fire.

  “Herr Biene,” I heard a meticulous German voice behind my back. “Even at the Duke of Badens birthday celebration in 1912 we didn’t see the likes of this, did we?”

  “Oh,” Herr Biene’s raucous and condescending voice came from behind my back. “Der Grossherzog von Baden ist, mit Respekt zu sprechen, einSchufi.”4

  By the Victory Statue, lights illuminated the red carpet. I went over to the Neva. At the Nikolayevsky Bridge, on the deck of a minesweeper next to the searchlight, a sailor with a shiny brillianteened head stood silently.

  “On me, on me!” the urchins on the riverbank called out.

  The sailor turned the searchlight and flooded a red-haired, green-freckled ragamuffin with unbearable light.

  “On the fortress!”

  “On the sky!”

  The ray, swift as a shot, threw a foggy radiant blemish on the sky.

  Then a potbellied old man in a chocolate coat and bowler hat came up. A bony old woman and their two flat-chested daughters in starched dresses followed him.

  “Comrade!” the old man said. “As we have just come in from Luga, one hopes, as the saying goes, that one will not miss out on anything.”

  The searchlight of minesweeper number such-and-such of the Baltic fleet left the Peter-and-Paul Fortress and headed for the visitor from Luga. It latched on to his belly covered by the chocolate coat, flooded it with radiance, and cast haloes around the heads of his flatchested daughters.

  THE CONCERT IN KATERINENSTADT

  This piece, a precursor to Babel's later stories that were to mixfiction with actual events and real people, is set in Katerinenstadt (later renamed Marx). This town was one of the many old German settlements in the Volga region that Babel visited in 1918 as a member of thefirst produce expedition organized by Sergei Malyshev (nicknamed the “Red Merchant”), who was one of the chief trade administrators in the early years of the Soviet Union. “With Lenins approval, he loaded a series of trains with goods useful to peasants, and sent these trains to the Volga region to exchange the goods for wheat” (“The Ivan and Maria”/

  Windermayer slowly comes up to the platform in the middle of the tavern. He is blind. His drowsy son hands him a concertina with dark bronze casings. We listen to a song he had brought with him from Tyrol.

  I am sitting by the window. The day fades over the market square. Pastor Ktihlberg comes out of the church, his head bowed deep in thought. The mysterious crowd surges in gende waves over the trampled ground.

  Mad Gottlieb moves around by the counter where the tavern keeper is standing. His Richard Wagner face is framed by a solemn mane of yellowish gray hair. A disdainful and heavy head is perched on the worn-out and insignificant little body of this man, who long ago slipped into insanity.

  Windermayer has finished his Tyrolian song. He is holding a Bible for the blind.

  “Windermayer! Play the song of the Heidelberg students!”

  Two swollen white pupils hover in the gloom. They are like the eyes of a blinded bird.

  “The young people are opening a Marx Club today, Diesenhoff is closing his tavern.”

  “What are you going to do, Windermayer?”

  “I haven’t been to my fatherland for fifty-two years. I’m going back to Tubingen.”

  Two weeks ago I came to Katerinenstadt with some unusual people—a group of cripples. We had formed a provision detachment for invalids, and set out for the German settlements on the Volga to acquire some grain.

  I can see them now from the window. They are hobbling over the market square with
tapping wooden legs. They have kitted themselves out with shining boots, and are wearing their George Crosses. The Council of Workers Deputies of Katerinenstadt is opening its first club today. The council is giving a ball in honor of the destitute and the liberated.

  The cripples disperse into different taverns. They order cutlets, each the size of a fist, their teeth tear at white buns with rosy brown crusts, and on the tables bowls of fried potatoes, crumbly, crisp, and hot potatoes, are steaming. Heavy drops of yellow, glowing butter drip from their trembling chins.

  The local peasants are summoned to the festivities by pealing bells. The hunched-over lay brothers are barely visible in the thickening darkness and the emerging stars. Drawing their balding heads into their bony shoulders, they hang tightly on to the moving bell-cables. Washed over by the darkness, the lay brothers bang the slow clappers against the sides of the Katerinenstadt bells.

  I saw the Bauers and the Mullers who had come from the settlements in the morning to go to church. Now they are sitting on the square again—blue-eyed, silent, wrinkled and bowed by work. A steady weak glow burns in every pipe. Old German women and yellow-haired girls sit rigidly on the benches.

  The house in which the club is located is on the other side of the square. Its windows are lit. Cavalrymen on Kirghiz horses ride slowly up to the gates. The horses have been seized from slaughtered officers near Uralsk.5 Curved sabers hang at the soldiers’ sides, and they are wearing wide-brimmed gray hats with dangling red ribbons.

  A group of commissars, German village craftsmen with red scarves around their necks, come out of the council. They take off their hats, cross the square, and head for the club. Through the lit-up windows we can see portraits of Marx and Lenin framed by garlands. Genosse6 Tietz, chairman and former locksmith, wearing a black frock coat, is walking in front of the commissars.

  The sound of the bells ceases abruptly, hearts shudder. Pastor Kiihlberg and Pater Uhljahm stand by the statue of the Virgin Mary next to the Roman Catholic church. A military band is playing the exquisite rhythms of the “Internationale” loudly and off-key. Genosse Tietz walks up to the podium. He’s about to give a speech.

  The hunched Germans stiffen on the benches. A weak flame smolders in every pipe. The stars shine above our heads. The rays of the moon have reached the Volga.

  Windermayer is receiving his last pay tonight. His concertina with the dark bronze casings is lying to the side. Diesenhoff, the tavern keeper, is counting out the money.

  The madman with Wagner s face is sleeping at the bar in his tattered frock coat, his high, yellow forehead lolling on the counter. Diesenhoff’s customers have fed him for twenty-two years.

  The blind mans son counts the money the tavern keeper has given his father.

  In the club, the broad wicks of the kerosene lamps burn with increasing brightness, the flames mixing with cigarette smoke.

  “So you re closing your tavern, Diesenhoff?” a German coming in from the street says to the old man.

  Diesenhoff answers without turning around, mumbling disdainfully in a low voice, “Why keep it open? The storehouses are empty, there’s no trade, they’ve chased away all the good customers. But you won’t have to go far, Gustav. There, on the other side of the square—word has it that things are quite jolly over there.”

  “What about Windermayer?”

  “He’ll go back to Tubingen to retire.”

  “Blodsinnft Wait for me here, Windermayer, I’ll go talk to Tietz. You can play at the club!”

  Gustav leaves. We see him descending the stairs, his tall shape dwindling in the hall. He takes Tietz to the side and they stand talking by the wall.

  The blind man waits in the empty tavern, his thin fingers resting on the concertina. Im still sitting by the window. Gottlieb is sleeping at the counter, his proud empty head glowing dimly. One of the commissars is standingOn the platform and, waving his arms, gives a speech to the people.

  IX

  Reports from Georgia1922-1924

  In 1921, Joseph Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze, the Georgian Bolshevik leaders in Moscow, outmaneuvered Lenin and sent the Red Army to occupy Georgia. They quickly established a Soviet regime, brutally crushing the local Communist factions and the Mensheviks, the non~Leninist wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which had played a leading role in the administration of the region since the Russian February Revolution of 1917. Early in 1922, Babel traveled through Tiblisi, Sokhumi, and the towns and villages along the Georgian, Abkhazian, and Ajarian seacoasts, to report on the progress of the Sovietification of the region.

  In these reports Babel traces much of what is wrong in the Georgia of 1922 back to Czarist Imperial Russia, which had gained control of the region through a series of annexations in the nineteenth century. Babel condemns the Russian nobility, which had set out in the early 1900s to turn Georgia’s Black Sea coast into a Russian Riviera that would eclipse France’s Cote d’Azur. He is even more unforgiving about the four years of Menshevik influence that followed the Russian Revolution. But, as always, he does not refrain from criticizing the misguided methods of the new Soviet regime.

  AT THE WORKERS’ RETREAT

  Beyond the veranda is the night, full of slow sounds and majestic darkness. An inexhaustible rain patrols the violet clefts of the mountains, and the gray rustling silk of its watery walls hangs over the cool and menacing dusk of the ravines. The blue flame of our candle flickers through the tireless murmur of the drumming water like a distant star, and twinkles on the wrinkled faces carved by the heavy, eloquent chisel of labor.

  Three old tailors, gentle as nursemaids, the charming M. who not too long ago lost an eye at his loom, and I who am worn out by the bitter, agonizing dust of our towns, are sitting on the veranda that extends into the night, the boundless, aromatic night. An ineffable calm rubs our sore, exhausted muscles with its maternal palms, and we sip our tea, unhurriedly and dreamily—three gentle tailors, the charming M., and I, a downtrodden but enthusiastic workhorse.

  You petite bourgeoisie, as talentless and hopeless as a storekeeper’s paunch, who built these “little dachas” for yourselves, if only you could see us rest in them! If only you could see our faces, ravaged by the steel-jawed machines, brighten up!

  This silent, masculine kingdom of peace, these vulgar dachas that the miraculous power of events transformed into Workers’ Retreats, embody the elusive and noble essence of careful, silent indolence, so revitalizing and peaceful. Oh, the peerless gesture of a worker’s resting hands chastely frugal and wisely deliberate! I watch with fixed rapture these unswerving, convulsive black hands, used to the complex and unflagging soul of the machine. It is the machine that has given the exhausted body its resigned, silent, and deliberate immobility. How much I learned of the philosophy of respite and the principles of resuscitating depleted energy on that noisy, clear evening, as the tailors and metal workers drank tea on the terrace in the Workers’ Retreat in Mtskhet.7

  Tipsy with tea, the boisterous champagne of the poor, we slowly and fervently sweat as we lovingly exchange subdued words and reminisce about how the Workers’ Retreats came to be.

  A year has passed since their birth. It was only last February that the Georgian Trade Union Commission came to Mtskhet for an initial survey. They found the dachas in a terrible state, uninhabitable, filthy, dilapidated. The Trade Union went to work with unflagging zeal to launch this blessed undertaking, the bourgeoisie pitching in to the extent its modest means allowed. As is well known, the penalties the Trade Union has imposed on storekeepers of every kind for violating labor laws have reached the comforting sum of six hundred million rubles. So a hundred and fifty million of this sum was spent turning the tumbledown dachas into Workers’ Retreats—from which it clearly follows that the bourgeoisie’s money, for which it had spat blood (emphasis on the blood), is supporting Georgia’s first workers’ spas, for which we bow our heads in thanks. There is an unshakable confidence in the air that, due to the intrinsic nature of t
he bourgeoisie, the influx of enforced donations will not flag, and will allow the Trade Union to unfurl a model Workers’ Town over the blossoming slopes of Mtskhet in lieu of the present dachas. Unfortunately, the grandiloquent compliments paid the bourgeoisie above are tainted by the memory of the astonishing and heroic battles the owners of the dachas fought in their war against the Trade Union. The owners threatened to go “all the way to the Czar.” And they did. Their path was long, and paved with the delicate poison of juridical pettifoggery. But “the Czar” (spelled VZIK^ in the new orthography) was prompt and just. The petitioners departed with a speed inversely proportional to the slowness of their arrival. The lesson that the dacha owners learned in their tireless quest for truth was that they had been born a good twenty years too late. An insightful lesson.

  The dachas are set up to hold sixty people. The Department of Labor Protection intends to increase their capacity to a thousand, a thousand five hundred people per season, calculating a two-week stay per worker. In certain cases this stay can be extended up to a month. But one does have certain reservations, since in the overwhelming majority of cases a two-weeks’ stay is not enough for our workers’ worn-out constitutions.

  The period of construction and reconstruction of the Mtskhet dachas is still continuing. Thus advice proffered with goodwill and love can be quite beneficial. For instance, the food which is, all told, healthy and abundant, should be increased at breakfast and dinnertime. Not to mention that it would be nice if they could eradicate the god-awful dormitory structure of these Workers’ Retreats. We get sick and tired of it, we who have to live in furnished rooms, offices, and barracks. What we need in the blissful two weeks in which we get to stretch our wracked and wheezing chests is a little corner of cleanliness, coziness, and with a modicum of seclusion.